Kaleb Lechowski: R’ha

Kaleb Lechowski’s “R’ha” ups the ante for solo writer/director/animators, proving that while the barrier to entry for solo animated filmmaking is lower than ever, expectations for production quality are rapidly rising.

Lechowski, 22, modeled most of the short’s assets in Blender and used Maya for shading, rigging, animation and most of the rendering (with Mental Ray). He leaned on zBrush for sculpting and Nuke and AfterEffects for compositing. Lechowski created “R’ha” during his first year studies at Germany’s Berlin Mediadesign Hochschule.

About the author

Justin Cone

Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog.
Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

It’s an awesome looking short. It looks a little too good. I don’t know how he managed to do this in 7 months. That part is hard to believe. This looks more like a team effort. The modeling alone would have taken months, then to get realistic looking animation would be at least as long to model.